Preventive healthcare startup Cent has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Blume Ventures and existing investor South Park Commons. The round, which combines equity and debt, is one of the most notable startup funding in India deals in healthtech this week, and it comes as the company expands medical imaging and diagnostic services aimed at catching serious illness before symptoms appear.

Who is behind Cent

Cent was founded in 2025 by Shashank ND, the founder of Practo, along with former Ola Electric chief marketing officer Anshul Khandelwal and former Lenskart product head Arpit Garg. The company did not disclose its valuation or the split between equity and debt in the new round.

Individual investors in the round include former Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin and former OpenAI B2B chief technology officer Srinivas Narayanan, alongside Sharath Narayana, Krishna Sridhar and Aprameya Radhakrishna.

What the money will build

Cent said it will use the capital to expand research and development and to strengthen its AI, engineering and clinical teams as it builds a preventive healthcare platform. Its flagship offering, Cent Check, combines full-body MRI, low-dose CT, DEXA, ECG, echocardiography and more than 100 biomarkers in a visit lasting roughly two hours, with results reviewed by specialist doctors.

The company operates preventive health centres across Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR, and says it has completed 10,000 whole-body scans since inception, targeting 10 million scans by 2035. It also announced the acquisition of Medsee, an AI-powered radiology reporting workflow platform founded by Chitra Singh, which drafts structured reports and highlights findings for review by qualified radiologists.

Cent's argument is that India's healthcare system is still built to treat illness, not to find it early. If preventive screening can be made precise and repeatable at scale, the company believes it can become infrastructure rather than just another clinic chain.

Why it matters for founders

Preventive health is a trust business before it is a technology business. Founders in this space should lead with clinical rigour, clear follow-up pathways and evidence from real scans — that is what earns both patients and investors.